The Pentagon: A History

by Steve Vogel

  The newspapers exhausted themselves with superlatives. “The pentagonal nest of buildings…dwarfs the great pyramid of Cheops,” the Times-Herald enthused. Its construction, the paper added, “was a story-making achievement without parallel outside the pages of the Arabian Nights’ tales or the annals of Paul Bunyan.” The Washington Post called it “a breathtaking study in immensity.”

  A War Department press release trumpeted the event as being “six months ahead of the schedule originally planned for the occupancy of the New War Department Office Building.” All the newspapers highlighted the claim, and it has entered the litany of standard facts recited about the Pentagon. Yet it is entirely untrue. From the day he proposed his building, Somervell had promised that half a million square feet would be ready six months after construction began; the contract signed by McShain in September stipulated that at least 500,000 square feet of the building was to be “ready for occupancy” no later than May 1, 1942, which was under eight months. They had met that deadline—indeed, with 100,000 square feet to spare—and were opening the building right on time.

  Ahead of schedule or not, the opening of the Pentagon for business on April 30, 1942, was an extraordinary achievement. It needed no embellishment. Barely more than nine months from the July evening when Somervell launched his idea, and seven and a half months after ground was broken, employees were moving into the world’s largest office building. Somervell’s promise had been fantastic, but its fulfillment was even more so. “It is almost inconceivable that any part of such a colossal structure…should now be occupied,” the Post noted in an editorial saluting the “remarkable feat.”

  Somervell was exhilarated, sending rare words of praise to Renshaw’s office the day occupancy began. “This is, I believe, a record-breaking accomplishment in which all concerned can take justifiable pride,” Somervell said.

  Somervell also sent a note on April 30 to Harry Hopkins, his old friend at the White House. Hopkins had made a bet—more than likely with Roosevelt—that the general would succeed in getting employees into the building by May 1. “This is merely to advise you that the Ordnance Department began moving into the new Army Building today,” Somervell wrote. “I believe this information will make it possible for you to collect a two-bit bet which I understand you have with a certain distinguished person.”

  Roosevelt and Hopkins came over to see the building for themselves on Saturday, May 2. The president told Renshaw he was delighted with the progress. Touring the interior, however, Roosevelt and Hopkins were puzzled to find four large washrooms on each of the main hallways leading from the outer ring of the building to the inner, according to an account related by historian Constance M. Green in Washington, A History of the Capital, 1800–1950. The president, “upon inquiring the reason for such prodigality of lavatory space,” was informed that this was to comply with Virginia segregation laws requiring separate facilities. But signs marking “colored” or “white” were never painted on the doors, possibly at the insistence of Roosevelt, who had signed the executive order banning discrimination in the federal government the previous summer. A War Department employee used chalk to mark the women’s restroom doors on one corridor as “white” and “colored,” but the markings were erased after complaints.

  Another confusing matter needed to be cleared up—the building’s name. The Army was still officially calling it the “New War Department Building in Arlington,” which was a mouthful. The situation was confounding, considering that another “New War Department Building” had opened a year earlier at 21st Street and Virginia Avenue in Washington. People would ask, “Which New War Department Building? The one on Virginia Avenue or the one in Virginia?” Some had taken to calling the first one the “Old New War Department Building” and the second the “New New War Department Building.”

  Nine days after occupation began, the Army threw in the towel and decided to call the building by the name many workers and officers had been using informally for months. On May 9, 1942, Major General James A. Ulio, who as adjutant general was in charge of all administrative matters for the Army and reported to Somervell, issued a curt one-paragraph memorandum: “For the information of all concerned, the building at 21st and Va. Ave. NW., is correctly designated as the ‘War Department Building’ the building in Arlington, now under construction for the War Department, is the ‘Pentagon Building.’”

  Preserving the War Department name for the building in Foggy Bottom was in keeping with Roosevelt’s insistence that, after the war, the Army headquarters would move back to Washington. The building in Arlington was somewhat second-class, an aberration of war. But it was now official: It was the Pentagon.

  The plank walkers

  Even as the Pentagon’s first occupants moved in, piles for the building’s foundation were being pounded into the ground in the final section. The last of 41,492 concrete piles—which if lined up would stretch two hundred miles—were still being driven well into May. The new employees were vastly outnumbered by the army of construction workers, whose strength had dropped temporarily from thirteen to eleven thousand with the completion of the first part but would soon rise again as a new push began to finish the building.

  Indeed, as much construction remained to be done as had been accomplished. When occupation began, the building was 50 percent finished, by Renshaw’s estimate. Marjorie Hanshaw and her co-workers certainly needed no reminder. On top of the pile driving, they coped with the hammering and sawing of carpenters and the rumbling of concrete trucks. Officers shouted on telephones to be heard over the thunderous percussion of jackhammers. The tapping of typewriter keys and clicking of calculating machines were drowned out by the continuous clamor of construction.

  Groves ordered Renshaw to make sure the higher-ups in the Ordnance Department were treated well. “I want them to have a good taste in their mouth towards the Engineers,” he told Renshaw.

  The overriding taste anybody in the building had was of dirt. Bulldozers grading the earth for roads raised enormous clouds of dust, which floated freely into the building and coated everything: water fountains, typewriters, the food in the cafeteria. It was thick enough to write with on any desk in the building.

  When there wasn’t dust, there was mud. “You just had to work your way through this muck, mud, water, and everything,” recalled payroll witness Hank Neighbors. “It was just a combination between a marsh and a moor.” Boards of lumber snaked around the grounds as walkways through the mud and puddles. In the Navy, the original crew members of a newly commissioned ship are called the “plank holders.” The first occupants of the Pentagon came up with a variation—they were the “plank walkers.”

  Reporting to the building for a job interview, Lucille Ramale, a nineteen-year-old newly arrived in Washington from Brick Church in western Pennsylvania, was instructed to follow a rifle-toting soldier into the building. “It was a mess,” she recalled. “The front entrance, it was so muddy, they had a plank down. You walked it. If anybody came towards you, they had to swing around you, or else put one foot in the mud.”

  Hanshaw and her office mates soon learned to keep lumber under their desks as well. “Oftentimes when it rained, we had our feet up on two-by-fours to keep them out of the water,” she recalled. Other times streams of water from restrooms flowed down corridors. Field mice and occasionally frogs roamed the building.

  “You know, today, environmentally, they wouldn’t let anybody in a place like that,” Marjorie Hanshaw Downey reflected more than sixty years later. “First of all, it was a hazard just walking among that stuff. We just worked in that condition and accepted it.”

  The ranks of War Department employees were growing steadily, about two hundred moving in every day. The entire Ordnance Department was soon in the building, followed quickly by other portions of Somervell’s Services of Supply (the general stayed in the Munitions Building for the time being with Stimson and Marshall). By June 7, more than seven thousand War Department employees were working in the b
uilding, with thousands more from the Signal Corps and Adjutant General’s office due to move in shortly. Already, the exodus of war workers from Washington to Arlington was noticeably relieving pressure on office space in the capital.

  Moving crews carried desks, file cabinets, and other furniture into the Pentagon twenty-four hours a day, though not always with the greatest of care. One night in May, movers dumped the contents of an Army office from the trucks onto the loading platform, leaving desks broken, bookcases with glass shattered, and cabinets scratched. “The actual handling of furniture was done by very unskilled workmen who did not have much regard for government property,” Major Bayard Schintelin, one of the victimized officers, complained to superiors.

  The employees were packed into the Pentagon, with only eighty-five square feet of office space allotted per worker, a tight ratio that would allow 37,000 people to fit in the building if maintained. The biggest office bays were crammed with as many as 450 desks.

  Senior officers wanted no part of such conditions and demanded partitions to wall off private office space. They wanted big, executive-style hardwood desks, too, complete with dentil molding around the edges. “If you gave a general an itty-bitty desk you’d be out of a job the next day,” recalled Allen Dickey, an architect overseeing the furnishing. Moreover, the generals were choosing the prime real estate, the offices on the outer E ring with windows looking out. It meant most employees were walled off from the outside. Renshaw, feeling a certain proprietary interest in the Pentagon, wanted to preserve what little ambience the building had. “They’re spoiling the outer ring in a lot of respects,” he complained to Groves in a telephone conversation May 14.

  Groves was incredulous. “You aren’t getting esthetic, are you?” he asked.

  “Almost,” Renshaw replied. “There are so few nice places in the building that I hate to ruin the nicest one by putting partitions there.” They should save the view for the masses.

  Groves was having difficulty understanding Renshaw’s point. This was a military headquarters, not an experiment in egalitarianism. “You want the big shots to have the view, don’t you?” Groves said.

  “I think the clerks would appreciate it more,” Renshaw persisted. In the same three hundred square feet needed to accommodate a private office for a general, he said, eight or ten clerks could have desks with a nice view.

  Renshaw was fighting a losing battle. The comforts for the privileged outweighed the accommodation of the masses. The big shots would always get the private, walled-off offices at the Pentagon, as well as the nice views.

  Overshooting the mark

  Somervell finally notified Congressional leaders by letter in May that his building was $14.2 million over budget. He also mentioned, almost as an aside, that due to the outbreak of war, it had become “necessary to abandon any plan to reduce the originally contemplated size of the building,” and that he had in fact increased it by 650,000 square feet. To stifle any outcry, Somervell assured the chairmen of the Senate and House appropriations committees in his letter that he would not ask Congress for the money and would instead cover the overrun with unexpended balances from other construction projects. The Army “constantly expanded the size of the building yet Somervell never once went up and asked for more money,” Groves later marveled.

  Groves offered no apologies himself about the additional cost when he appeared before a House Appropriations subcommittee on June 15 to brief members on the building’s progress. (Groves always took an aggressive approach with Congress. “I’m in favor of asking for a lot and letting them turn you down if they have the nerve—they won’t have the nerve,” he once explained to a fellow officer.)

  “You have overshot the mark by a pretty big margin,” remarked the subcommittee chairman, J. Buell Snyder of Pennsylvania.

  “The building has overshot the original conception both as to size and speed of completion,” Groves retorted. The building, he added, would total four million square feet. Asked how many workers it would hold, Groves offered no specifics. “It will have all of the capacity that was originally contemplated, and a great deal more,” he said.

  No protest was raised at the increased size or cost. Instead, much of the hearing dealt with complaints that the floors of the Pentagon were dusty. “We can get rid of the dust inside the building, but we cannot get rid of the dust outside, and it keeps coming in,” Groves explained.

  Renshaw was incredulous; they had been dreading Congress’s reaction to the overrun, and all the members cared about was the dust. “They listened to a $15 million deficit, and swallowed it without a comment,” he afterward told George Holmes, Somervell’s PR man. “When somebody said there was dust on the floors, they sent for me to come up and explain it.”

  “Well, I’ll be darned,” said Holmes.

  Nothing is usual

  Like everyone else, Marjorie Hanshaw was still having trouble locating her desk—every day a new office had sprung up or a corridor was blocked with construction materials. Another employee, Robert Sanders, tried identifying visual landmarks to mark his way. Almost inevitably, by the time he made a second trip, the landmark had disappeared. Returning to their office from a meeting about manufacturing small arms, two Ordnance workers soon realized they were hopelessly lost but were too embarrassed to admit it; finally they followed exit signs outside to regain their bearings. It was happening all the time.

  Adding to the confusion was the jumble of numbers and letters marking room numbers—2D-489, for example. Renshaw had come up with the numbering system on the fly shortly before occupancy started. Ordered one day to quickly develop a scheme, Renshaw sat down at an empty desk and drew a sketch of the building. It showed the five rings, labeled A for the inner ring through E for the outer ring, and the ten radial corridors, labeled 1 through 10 in clockwise order. Each office was numbered according to its floor, its ring, the nearest corridor, and then the specific office bay, in that order. Thus 2D-489 was on the second floor, on the D ring, off of corridor 4, in bay 89.

  Groves was skeptical. “It already sounds like a procurement authority,” he complained to Renshaw. Actually, once mastered, Renshaw’s numbering system would prove a reliable guide to finding an office no matter where it was in the building. The interior setup of offices would change considerably over the years, but Renshaw’s method—drawn up in about ten minutes—has stayed intact.

  Yet to newcomers, it was like reading Greek. Nobody could remember which number referred to what.

  “Nothing is usual about your thing over there,” Groves told Renshaw. “Nobody can find his way around.”

  My people are Americans

  The cafeteria, at least, was well-marked. Henry E. Bennett followed the signs directing him through the maze of hallways and down to the first floor. Bennett, a clerk in the Ordnance Department, had moved into the Pentagon that morning, Thursday, May 14, part of the vanguard. Like about 10 percent of War Department employees, Bennett was black. He joined a group of Ordnance staff—several secretaries and another man, all black—for lunch. Entering the cafeteria, they got in line but were immediately intercepted by a cafeteria supervisor: Colored employees were to eat in a separate dining room in the back. Bennett started to object, but one of the secretaries grabbed him by the arm. Don’t make a scene, she said.

  They went to the rear as directed, where a smaller, dustier, and shabbier dining room awaited, occupied and operated solely by blacks. Bennett got the lamb stew but was unable to take a bite. He had lost his appetite. A modest and serious-minded twenty-nine-year-old, Bennett had overcome a hardscrabble youth in Texas and Indiana—helping to raise his younger siblings by shining shoes—to graduate with honors from high school. He had interrupted his studies of mathematics and commerce at Indiana State Teachers College in Terre Haute to serve his country. Bennett sat at the table, seething, ignoring his companions’ pleas to eat. As the group prepared to leave, a cafeteria worker passed on some news: There was a young colored man who had refused to go t
o the back and was eating in the white section.

  Bennett wanted to meet this man. He was easy to spot in the white section, sitting alone at a table, a slight young man, 5'7? and 140 pounds, wearing glasses. Bennett walked over and introduced himself. The young man was Jimmy Harold, a well-spoken, bright twenty-one-year-old who had come from Detroit six months earlier to join the war effort and had taken a job as an assistant engineer and draftsman with the Ordnance field service. This was his first day in the Pentagon too. Harold’s polite and mild manner could not disguise the inner steel of a man whose upbringing would not allow him to accept second-class citizenship. Bennett liked him instantly. If anything happens, he told Harold, come find me.

  Roosevelt’s executive order barring discrimination in the federal government had succeeded in keeping the Pentagon’s restrooms from being segregated. The cafeteria was different. The Public Buildings Administration, which normally operated cafeterias in federal buildings, had refused to do so in the Pentagon until the building was finished; it was still a construction site. Yet some way had to be found to feed the employees; isolated as the Pentagon was, there were few places nearby where they could eat.

  The Army had turned to McShain for help. The builder’s food subcontractor was already feeding thirteen thousand–plus construction workers every day. Renshaw asked the subcontractor, Industrial Food Systems Inc. of Washington, to operate a temporary cafeteria inside the Pentagon for War Department employees until the building was finished. The contractor set up the Pentagon employees’ cafeteria with separate sections for black and white workers, the same as the construction cafeteria. The building had not been officially turned over to the Army, the contractors reasoned, and thus remained subject to Virginia law. However, Virginia had ceded the entire site to the federal government in March.